"...a weakness of the will."

Showing my age...

On Friday I found myself eating lunch with a very interesting law professor. We were talking about this that and the other, and the conversation came around to two friends of mine from law school that I knew that the professor knew. I mentioned that these two friends were among the smartest people that I have ever known, which happens to be entirely correct. The professor gave me an indulgent look and said, "That is no doubt a function of your age. I can only hope that in ten years the smartest people you know won't be folks that you met around Gannett House." No doubt a worthy hope, but it is never comfortable to have the obvious truth that you are a greenie vividly pointed out over lunch...

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Nate, nice new blog. Why doesn't anyone stay in one place anymore? This must be your fifth blog.

Anyway, I think your lunch mate is wrong and is just exposing the hubris of age. Age is irrelevant to genius -- we're no more likely to know brilliant people when we're old. At what stage of life does your friend imagine we should expect to meet people smarter than the smartest students at Harvard Law School? Elders are no doubt wiser, but from my "adult" age of 33 I can still say that my fellow contestants at junior high math competitions were among the smartest people I have ever known. And while I have no confidence that my future will expose me to more geniuses than I knew there, I see no reason to lament that fact.